Education minister Radzi Jidin said Malaysian students who sat for PISA were good with mathematical formulas.

“But there is some catching up to do with analytical skills,” he said while winding up his ministry’s speech on the Supply Bill 2022 at the committee stage.

He said the PISA rankings showed that Malaysian students found analytical thinking to be challenging, and more had to be done to address it.

He said his ministry had decided to expose schoolchildren to high order thinking skills by including syllabus material that involved analytical thinking.

PISA is an international assessment that measures 15-year-old students’ reading, mathematics, and science literacy every three years.

In the latest 2018 ranking, Malaysia ranked 48 out of 79 countries for Mathematics, 49 for science and 57 for reading. China and Singapore scored first and second for all three categories.